Your view is inside
the rail entrance to Birkenau, known as the Death Gate. Scrolling this time
to the left, you are confronted with the unloading ramp. Here trains from all
over Nazi occupied Europe traveled with their human contents to be, in large
part, murdered in the gas chambers of this, the biggest killing center in the
Nazi system. Birkenau was known not only as a concentration and labor camp,
but a death camp as well - "Vernichtungslager". It was opened some
time in early 1942. The ramp was used to unload trains only after May 1944.
May and June '44 were the largest production totals for this death factory,
murdering approximately 10,000 people a day; mostly Jews from Hungary, mainly
from the Budapest Ghetto. And on one day, a "record" 20,000 people
were sent to the gas chambers.